"It is not what it used to be, Jake," she said in tones of complaisant earnestness. "Now that I know you are a married man it is all gone. _Yes_, Jake, it is all gone! You should have cared for me when she was still there. Then you could have gone to a rabbi and sent her a writ of divorce. It is too late now, Jake." "It is not too late!" he protested, tremulously. "I will get a divorce, _anyhoy_. And if you don't take me I will hang myself," he added, imploringly. "On a burned straw?" she retorted, with a cruel chuckle. "It is all very well for you to laugh. But if you could enter my heart and see how I _shuffer_!" "Woe is me! I don't see how you will stand it," she mocked him. And abruptly assuming a grave tone, she pursued vehemently: "But I don't understand; since you sent her tickets and money, you must like her." Jake explained that he had all along intended to send her rabbinical divorce papers instead of a passage ticket, and that it had been his old mother who had pestered him, with her tear-stained letters, into acting contrary to his will. "_All right_," Mamie resumed, with a dubious smile; "but why don't you go to Fanny, or Beckie, or Beilké the "Black Cat"? You used to care for them more than for me. Why should you just come to me?" Jake answered by characterizing the girls she had mentioned in terms rather too high-scented for print, protesting his loathing for them. Whereupon she subjected him to a rigid cross-examination as to his past conduct toward herself and her rivals; and although he managed to explain matters to her inward satisfaction, owing, chiefly, to a predisposition on her own part to credit his assertions on the subject, she could not help continuing obdurate and in a spiteful, vindictive mood. "All you say is not worth a penny, and it is too late, _anyvay_," was her verdict. "You have a wife and a child; better go home and be a father to your _boy_." Her last words were uttered with some approach to sincerity, and she was mentally beginning to give herself credit for magnanimity and pious self-denial. She would have regretted her exhortation, however, had she been aware of its effect on her listener; for her mention of the boy and appeal to Jake as a father aroused in him a lively sense of the wrong he was doing. Moreover, while she was speaking his attention had been attracted to a loosened pillowcase ominously fluttering and flapping a yard or two off. The figure of his dead father, attired in burial linen, uprose to his mind. "You don' vanted? Alla right, you be shorry," he said half-heartedly, turning to go. "_Hol' on!_" she checked him, irritatedly. "How are you going to _fix_ it? Are you _sure_ she will take a divorce?"